Saturday, January 14, 2012

Ogrian Carpet is a first-person 'shooter' inspired by Bullfrog's Magic Carpet. It started as a remake of Arabian Flights, which I made from Oct 2002 to Oct 2003. My goal was to create an impressive demo of my coding ability, to facilitate my entrance into the games development industry when I graduate.

I wrote it in java because I am very good at java, and I believed it would allow me to get a good project done (reletively) quickly. I was correct, and I am very happy with the result. However, Arabian Flights is plauged with Java3D library bugs (which may never be fixed) and bad performance. Also, Most 3D games are not written in Java.

Thus, I decided to re-make the game in a whole other language, namely C++. I found the Ogre3D engine and realized it would make an excellent graphics library for my remake. Thus the name 'Ogrian Carpet'. I was espeically pleased with Ogre when I was able to make a landscape with ocean, sky, and islands in a matter of hours based on the examples. What had taken me 30 hours to do with Java3D took less then 5 hours of simply cutting and pasting from the Ogre Examples. The result was significantly prettier too. I quickly set up a SourceForge account and threw together this webpage.

The Purpose of Arabian Flights was to show off my coding ability. To facilitate this, I open-sourced it. This means that anyone can get the source code freely, and even use it in their own projects (as long as their project is also licenced under the GPL). This also meant that I could use SourceForge's resources for free, including ad-free webhosting and CVS services.

I waited until I was done with Arabian Flights before releasing it under the GPL, but for Ogrian Carpet, I am releasing it under the GPL from the beginning. I feel that I have proven my ability to code alone, and I welcome any help on my current project.

If you want to work on Ogrian Carpet with me, simply sign up with SourceForge as a developer (if you haven't already) and send me an email saying you want to join the team.

Screenshots.

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